Moving Forward Archive

At Mardi Gras, St. Landry Parish throws its biggest party of the year. Practically every community celebrates the season in some fashion, and in most places it is a celebration with a difference.

That difference brings more and more visitors to the parish for each year’s celebration, and those visitors bring money to our hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, service stations, and practically every other local business.

In St. Landry Parish, “Mardi Gras is not your typical festival with congested crowds, beads, and doubloons,” according to the St. Landry Parish tourist commission. “At certain festivities, these trinkets are rarely in sight. Instead, locals trade floats for horses, beads for bells, and rowdy streets for a day of revelry in rural areas.”

And, as different as those celebrations are from urban celebrations, there are differences within each of the smaller celebrations.

In a culture where music is a big part of everyday life, it is at the heart of Mardi Gras festivities and practically every celebration ends in a community dance, powered by zydeco scrub boards or Cajun accordions or swamp pop saxophones—or a combination of all of them.

In more recent years, trail rides have been added to events held during Mardi Gras season.  Trail rides are an important part of the creole culture in St. Landry Parish, a place with a thriving equine industry. The modern cowboy, or girl, rides on horseback followed by a procession of participants in trailers, with food and music along the way.

A century-old celebration takes place in Eunice, where men and women on horseback, don handcrafted masks, tall hats called capuchons, and distinctive costumes. The five-day celebration begins the Friday before Mardi Gras Day, but the main event is the Courir de Mardi Gras, a wild horseback ride based on 

early begging rituals. Riders go from house to house soliciting “donations” of food items for a community-wide gumbo.

Over the years, the Eunice courir has grown to include more than 2,000 participants, and quadruple that number of visitors who come to participate in the tradition and contribute to the economy.

A recent study by the University of New Orleans found that the average visitor to one of our regular festivals will spend more than $60 per day and that “for every new dollar of direct spending, additional dollars of secondary spending are generated in the economy.” That secondary spending could be as much as two-thirds of the primary spending, adding another $40 per day to the total economic impact. That means $100,000 circulating in the local economy for every 1,000 regular festival visitors, and Mardi Gras isn’t just a regular festival.

“The impact from visitors adds up quickly,” St. Landry tourism director Celeste Gomez points out, “and can be especially significant to some of our smaller communities.” And it adds up to even more during the Mardi Gras season when, according to some estimates, our celebrations bring tens of thousands of free-spending visitors to St. Landry.

To our good fortune, the number of Mardi Gras visitors will continue to grow as visitors enjoy a unique Mardi Gras experience and are introduced to our distinctive culture. A recent study on “heritage tourism” predicted “a steady rise in country Mardi Gras tourism.”

There’s a reason for that, growth, and Eunice city clerk Ginny Moody may have put her finger on it when she asked a newspaper reporter several years ago, “Where else can you dance in a barn, dance in the streets, even dance in our restaurants as you order your food?”

The answer, Gomez says, is, “Not many places.”